


Catharsis

by AuralQueer



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Hurt/Comfort, Lonely! Martin, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 07:34:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19168693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuralQueer/pseuds/AuralQueer
Summary: Bad Things Happen Bingo Prompt: "I Know You're In There Somewhere"The thing about Wembley Stadium during the FA Cup final was that it was really, really supposed to be full of people. Instead, 90,000 seats sat impossibly empty. Cameras rolled down tracks beside the pitch, humming against their metal railings with no one to stop or guide them. The great, burning white stadium lights burned down on the unnaturally green field of the pitch itself.In the middle of that pitch stood the thing that used to call itself Martin Blackwood.(Set around s4, featuring Lonely!Martin)





	Catharsis

The thing about Wembley Stadium during the FA Cup final was that it was really, really supposed to be full of people. Instead, 90,000 seats sat impossibly empty. Cameras rolled down tracks beside the pitch, humming against their metal railings with no one to stop or guide them. The great, burning white stadium lights burned down on the unnaturally green field of the pitch itself. 

In the middle of that pitch stood the thing that used to call itself Martin Blackwood.

White fog crept like smoke in long, sweeping tendrils, over the stadium seats. It fell over the concrete in silent waterfalls, and pooled around the edges of the pitch, as if it could somehow flood the place. 

Martin’s eyes: usually the blue-green of a sea in summer, are opaque and white. He looks without seeing, hands in his pockets. He speaks very quietly, and Jon can still hear him perfectly from where he stands at the tunnel that feeds from the players’ changing rooms and onto the pitch itself.

“My Dad took me here once. It wasn’t for the finals.” Martin’s nose wrinkles, and it’s terribly human. “It was loud.” His expression eases into a distant, soft smile. “It’s quiet now.”

Jon steps onto the pitch. The grass is soft and springs beneath his feet. It’s a hot day, but it feels as if the stadium has been shoved into a walk in freezer. He’d be half amazed that no news helicopters have come to report on the disappearance of nearly a hundred thousand people, but a thing that is in his head and not his mind tells him that the white fog wreathing the stadium like a crown would not allow so mundane an intrusion. 

“Martin.” His voice comes out more roughly than he intends it to, and Jon is half amazed there’s anything left in him to process every emotion pulling its way through his body as he walks, slowly, closer to the monster that used to be his friend.

Martin’s head tilts to look at him, and there is a sudden, howling void between them. Nothing changes. The pitch remains the same, the distance is fixed. But suddenly, Jon is more convinced than he has ever been of anything that he will never be able to reach Martin Blackwood. The empty seats of the stadium loom impossibly high above him, rearing like a wave that will never fold. 

“He knew you, didn’t he?” Martin’s voice is soft and friendly and polite. His posture is relaxed. Jon feels like he’s walking into a gale. 

“Martin knows me. We’re friends.” Jon’s voice is firm. He takes another step. It feels impossibly slow, and he isn’t sure it’s taken him anywhere. 

The thing tilts Martin’s head to the side, at an angle that cannot be comfortable. Fog slips out of his mouth, as if he’d been smoking. “Even if you reach me, Archivist, it won’t make a difference.” Martin’s mouth smiles, and it doesn’t look like a smile that Martin’s ever worn. “Even in a crowd, we can still feel entirely alone.” It gestures, raising its arms to the stadium as if were a conductor. “Do you really think the people here ever felt anything more than a simulation of connection? You belong to the Eye. Let me show you.”

Fog surges forward from the stadium, engulfing Jon’s back and wrapping around his head, slipping into his ears and mouth and eyes. Noise hits him first: deafening and painful. The shouting and chanting of a thousand people, all angry for different reasons. A boy, embarrassed by the advances his friend had rejected. A father, thinking of his wife and the distance between them. A mother, vicious to her husband and her daughter, thinking bitterly of everything she couldn’t do that came so easily to them. Jon’s brain is a whirlwind of faces, snarling and screaming and trying desperately to convince every stranger around them that they fitted in. That they were meant to be there.

That they weren’t alone. 

Jon grits his teeth, and concentrates, searching through the blur. It’s like seeing 90,000 TV channels at once, and it hurts, but finally he hears a voice he’d know anywhere, even at six years old and high and small and nervous. 

“Who are we supporting?”

The reel comes to a stop, and Jon is staring at a small boy. He barely makes it to his father’s waist, and his head is covered in bright golden curls. He’s skinny, skinnier than Jon had expected him to be. His clothes are old and hang from his body, in a way Jon recognises as being second hand. Next to him, his father is tall. If he’d had curls, it’s not clear, his blonde hair is cropped close to his head. Their eyes are the same colour.

“What do you mean?” Martin’s father has a plastic cup of beer in his hand. There’s an empty bottle at his feet, and more beer spilled on the floor, but if it belongs to him or their neighbours, it isn’t clear. Martin shifts from one foot to the other. His trousers are a little too short for him. 

“W-which team are we supporting?”

Martin’s father’s lip curls. Jon thinks he can see the resemblance, somewhat. Martin’s father is more muscular than Martin himself as an adult. But their eyes and hair are the same colour, and they both have the same rounded nose. Martin’s father tenses, and Jon is seized with the irrational urge to somehow step between him and his son, in the beer-soaked stands. But Martin’s father glances up, at the crowds, and the tendons in his arm relax. “Are you a fucking idiot?” Martin’s father spits, instead, gesturing with a quick gesture to his red shirt. Martin flinches. “Man U. Obviously.” Martin’s father bends down, and his beer sloshes in its cup. Martin stays very still, though his whole body is stiff. “The ones in red.” Martin’s father’s voice is a sing song parody of kindness, twisted into condescension. 

And then there’s movement on the pitch, and a crescendo of a roar from the crowd, and the noise swallows them and Martin’s father turns, quickly, screaming. His beer spills into Martin’s hair, and Martin flinches, but he raises his voice too, quiet and high and uncertain. 

The image stops, and Jon finds himself again in a cold, empty, impossibly quiet stadium. He can still hear the ringing of the crowd in his ears. He can almost feel the beer in his hair, cold and dripping onto his forehead. 

The thing that used to be Martin Blackwood frowns, crumpling the creamy skin of his brow. “That was rude. He might not have wanted you to see that.”

Jon takes a deep breath and forces himself to look into the thing’s eyes. The white in them moves and swirls like the fog carpeting the stadium. “I’ll have to apologise to him later.”

The thing smiles a little. Its hands are still in its pockets. Jon is halfway across the pitch towards it now. The field sweeps out to either side of them, and he’s painfully aware of the camera that has stopped, somehow, to film them. “You cannot follow him, Archivist. That’s not how it works.”

“How does it work?” Jon lets the hum of power buzz behind his teeth as he asks the question. He raises his chin. The creature laughs, and it sounds exactly like Martin Blackwood. 

“He came to me of his own volition. You cannot change that. If you wanted to, perhaps you should have done something sooner.” The thing keeps smiling, but the fog in Jon’s ears coils, and he can feel the chill of it inside his skull.

Jon’s vision goes dark, and he sees himself, sitting at his desk. He has no scars, or at least no more than those he’d acquired through regular misadventures. His hand is whole. His face is unmarred by the memory of Jane Prentiss. Jon watches himself scowl as the door opens a little wider. He hears Martin’s voice as if he’s standing next to him.

“I brought some tea.” Jon can feel the anxiety in Martin’s chest. The little jump as he carefully watches the tea and tries to avoid letting it spill on the dull brown carpet.

“Really. I could have sworn we paid you to do your job, not run around playing mother.” The Jonathan Sims that had never heard of The Archivist or The Entities is bored and cruel. Jon feels the quick flash of pain that Martin hurriedly ignores, folding it away in the corner of his mind. He notices the mess of emotion focused around any mention of a mother: worry for Martin’s own, grief and frustration for the mothering he never knew, the longing to at least provide it for someone else.

But Martin smiles. “Fair enough. Well. If you want it, it’s here.” Carefully, he sets the mug down on Jon’s desk. Jon reaches for it without looking up. The rejection stings, but Martin folds it away, on top of the rest, and nods once to try and hide his embarrassment. “I’ll, um, see you later.”

Jon of the past waves him off. Martin hurries out of the office and into the corridor. Once he’s a few steps away and sure that he’s alone, he lets his smile fall. He keeps his head low until he gets back to his desk. Tim and Sasha are away today. The cramped office for the Archival Assistants’ feels painfully empty. Martin buries himself in his work, ignoring the sting of embarrassment at Jon’s many, aggressive annotations on the statements he’d submitted previously. He stays late that day, until he’s sure that Jon is gone. Then he picks up his coat. He has three missed calls from his mother. He accepts the heavy sinking in his stomach without trying to fight it, and hits dial.

Martin’s mother greets him in Polish. Both Martin and Jon understand her perfectly. “Where have you been? Is your work so much more important than your sick mother?”

Jon pulls back and ignores the churning of guilt in his gut. The thing that used to be Martin Blackwood smiles amiably at him. “I know what I did to him.” Jon’s fingers curl at his sides. He takes another step forward. “That’s why I have to bring him back.”

The thing’s hands stay in its pockets. Sunlight filters weakly through the fog over the stadium. The silence echoes. “I might have to kill you, Archivist.”

Jon takes a deep breath. He keeps walking. The metres between them seem to stretch into miles. “I know.”

“He wouldn’t like that, I think. It would make him very sad. He was so lost when you left him before.”

Jon doesn’t have the warning of cold this time. There’s just Martin, sitting by his bed in the hospital. He’s holding Jon’s limp hand and sobbing, cradling his burned fingers between his own as his shoulders heave and shake. The ache of his grief is almost impossible to comprehend, and Jon can barely breathe. When the stadium returns, his cheeks are wet with tears.

The thing smiles widely, and Martin’s cheeks dimple. “You led him to me before. I think that killing you would make him stay.”

Jon finally, finally reaches the thing that used to be Martin Blackwood. He looks up at it. Jonathan Sims is not a short man, but Martin Blackwood is tall. Jon looks into the swirling white mist in his eyes, and imagines the blue-green of a summer sea. “I suppose he has a choice, then.” Jon reaches up, and touches Martin’s cheek.

The thing that’s wearing his body doesn’t pull away.

Martin’s skin should be warm, and soft, and giving. All that meets Jon’s fingers is cold air. He keeps his hand where it is and takes a deep breath. “I know you’re in there somewhere.” Jon says, softly, ignoring the monster and the empty stadium and the ghostly echoes of 90,000 people screaming as they were stolen from reality. Jon raises his other hand and brushes a stray curl back from Martin’s head. It feels as if his hand is passing through cold water.

Jon plants his feet in the grass and breathes. Then he asks, “Can you hear me?” The thing in front of him shudders, and frowns. White fog begins to wrap around them like a web, until all there is in the whole world is Jonathan Sims and the thing that was Martin Blackwood and Jon’s question, shivering in the air.

“Of course I can hear you – ” The thing begins.

“I wasn’t talking to you.” Jon says, firmly, and pulls on the power inside him, and thinks he’ll trade a little more of himself away, if it means getting Martin Blackwood back. “Can you hear me? Martin?”

The air shivers. The fog ripples as if it were a physical thing that had been struck by some mighty force. The thing opens its mouth, and shuts it, and leans back. Jon tries to hold it in place. Martin solidifies under his hand: still cold, but there. Somehow. There.

Martin’s eyes shut, and then they squeeze, wrinkling like a child’s. He blinks. Jon sees the blue-green of a sea in summer. His breath shakes when he breathes. Martin says, softly, roughly, “Jon? What….” He cuts himself off with a whimper, doubling over, and the temperature drops, and then suddenly Jon is standing on nothing, in a void of white smoke.

“He is not yours. You lost him. You gave him up.” The thing that is trying to steal Martin Blackwood sounds almost petulant. Jon looks down at it, and knows it, for all that it is. There is a great and terrible anger inside him, and he’s not sure whether it’s his own or that of the god he has been so unwillingly assigned. It doesn’t matter. He pushes it aside, and crouches down, and gently sets his hands on Martin’s shoulders. Martin’s jumper is rough and thick beneath his fingers.

“Will you come back to me, Martin?”

The fog makes no sound, but it writhes and twists and flinches like a living thing. Martin’s body heaves, and he coughs. Jon watches him, and waits, and tries not to think about the fact that the greatest love he’s ever known is hanging by a thread between them.

There’s a distant roar. It’s fragmented: torn by weeping, and screaming, and shouting. The anger and the fear turn to joy. There’s singing, and laughter, and cheering. There’s the stamping of thousands of feet. Jon holds his breath as the fog dissipates, and he finds himself crouched on a football pitch in front of 90,000 people, suddenly alive. Suddenly together. No longer alone.

Martin heaves a great gasp, and coughs and splutters, and fog spills like vomit from his mouth and slinks away. And then he stops coughing, and he looks up, and his face is streaked with tears and his eyes are bright and blue and green. “Jon. How?”

Jon shakes his head, and squeezes the soft curve of Martin’s shoulders, and looks into Martin’s eyes. And there are 90,000 people watching them, but they might as well be entirely alone.

“I really think you ought to know I love you.” He says, and then he leans forward and kisses him. It’s clumsy, and hard, and awkward and silly and impulsive.

But Martin catches his breath under Jon’s lips, and raises his hands to Jon’s shoulders, and they’re shaking. And then he’s gently cupping the back of Jon’s head, and he’s kissing him back, and Jon thinks they’re both crying and he has no idea what the footballers think but it doesn’t matter.

The world keeps moving. Martin Blackwood is in it.

That’s enough.


End file.
